In response: Restarting reactor a reckless proposal

Patrick Moore is entitled to his opinion on Southern California Edison and the crippled nuclear reactors at San Onofre (“The future of California’s energy portfolio,” Nov. 15). But your readers should be aware that he is a paid mouthpiece for the nuclear industry. His Clean and Safe Energy Coalition was created by the Nuclear Energy Institute to promote expansion of nuclear energy.

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So it’s not surprising that on the crisis at San Onofre he parrots Edison’s party line: They won’t restart until it’s safe to do so. But this spin is simply not credible.

Edison’s proposal to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to restart reactor Unit 2 reveals that they have no repair plan or even a timetable for fixing the plant’s damaged steam generators. Instead they propose to operate a broken reactor at partial power and see what happens. It’s a reckless experiment – the same profits-before-safety thinking that drove Edison to replace the original generators with an unproven and unlicensed design that failed in less than two years.

Nuclear power is not clean, safe or efficient – and further, makes no economic sense. The future for California lies in energy efficiency and renewable energy, and the state is well on the way. More than 10 percent of California’s electricity is already provided by solar, wind, biomass or geothermal power, and by law the state must reach 33 percent from renewables by 2020. By then renewable energy will create up to half a million jobs in the state.

The real cost of nuclear energy is too great for California to bear. San Onofre must remain shut down. – Damon Moglen, Energy and Climate director, and Shaun Burnie, Nuclear Campaign adviser, Friends of the Earth, Washington, D.C.